Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help reduce staffing shortages in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

This year the Department is investing an extra £688 million in children and young people’s mental health services. This will allow us to hire more staff, deliver more talking therapies, and get waiting lists down through our Plan for Change.

Early interventions in mental health support for young people can have positive ramifications for the rest of their lives. We will deliver on our commitment to get every child who needs it access to mental health support within school, and over the course of this year we will roll that support out to nearly a million extra children. Under Government plans, all pupils will have access to mental health support in school by 2029/30.

As part of our mission to build a National Health Service that is fit for the future and that is there when people need it, we will recruit 8,500 mental health workers across child and adult mental health services to help ease the pressure on busy services. We continue to work with NHS England to consider options to deliver this commitment, alongside publishing a refreshed workforce plan to deliver the transformed health service we will build over the next decade.

In addition, targeted retention work has been undertaken through the NHS Retention Programme which works with trusts to help them understand why staff have left. This has focused on better support for line managers and improved support for new joiners.